Episode 142: The Sex Beast: Jazz, Murder, and Melvin Rees

In the summer of 1959, a quiet dread began to settle over the backroads of Virginia and Maryland. At first, it was subtle—just headlines and whispers. A family vanishing after a visit to relatives. A young couple attacked in a parked car. Police and the public were left with fragments, disconnected horrors with no clear thread. But beneath the surface, a pattern was forming. And at the center of it was a man no one suspected.

Melvin Rees was, on the surface, unremarkable. A jazz musician with a scholarly air, he floated between smoky clubs and college campuses, trading in philosophy, music, and charm. But behind the saxophone and smooth conversation was a predator—methodical, sadistic, and deeply dangerous. The press would later give him a name: The Sex Beast.

In 1957, Margaret Harold was murdered in cold blood on a quiet Maryland road, shot point-blank by a stranger with a .38 revolver. What followed was an act of post-mortem violence so grotesque that even hardened investigators were shaken. The case went cold, until, two years later, Carroll and Mildred Jackson and their two daughters disappeared without a trace. Their car was found abandoned. No struggle. No clues. Just gone.

Months later, their bodies were discovered—dumped in ditches and shallow graves, scattered across Virginia and Maryland. The cruelty they endured was unmistakable. This was not impulsive violence. It was calculated. Rehearsed. Someone had enjoyed what they did.

The investigation pulled in hundreds of leads, including, bizarrely, a psychic named Peter Hurkos who claimed he could sense the killer’s identity. Some of his descriptions were eerily accurate, but ultimately, it wasn’t clairvoyance that cracked the case. It was a letter.

A man named Glenn Moser had once been friends with Rees. They’d talked about life, about morality—and chillingly, about murder. Rees, high on benzedrine, had once mused to Moser that killing was just another experience. After the Jackson murders made headlines, Moser couldn’t shake the feeling that Rees had meant it literally.

Rees had vanished by then. But a year later, he sent Moser a letter from Arkansas, casually mentioning his new job at a music store in West Memphis. This time, Moser didn’t hesitate. He took the letter to police.

The FBI tracked Rees down. In a saxophone case, they found the gun. But they also found something else: a collection of handwritten notes. They weren’t just ramblings—they were confessions. Graphic, detailed accounts of the killings. One note, clipped to a newspaper photo of Mildred Jackson, read: “Then tied and gagged, led her to a place of execution and hung her. I was her master.”

With the murder weapon, a written record, and an eyewitness from the Harold case ready to testify, Rees’s fate was sealed. He was convicted in Maryland and sentenced to life for Harold’s murder. In Virginia, he was sentenced to death for the murder of the Jackson family. But legal delays and questions about his mental state stalled the execution. In 1972, his death sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Rees was suspected in at least four other unsolved murders—young women and girls found raped and killed near the University of Maryland. In 1985, he reportedly confessed to two of them during a jailhouse interview. But he was never tried for those crimes. In 1995, Melvin Davis Rees died of heart failure in prison. He never showed remorse. Never confessed to all of it. He simply faded into the system—another name in the long, grim ledger of American crime.

Rees didn’t want headlines. He wanted control. To be the master, the one who decides who lives and who suffers. But in the end, it was a friend’s conscience—and a killer’s own arrogance—that brought him down.